Rate, track, and categorize your AMVs

Known issues/bugs

Here I will keep a running list of any known issues/bugs that you may encounter while using AMV Tracker. Please check here before posting anywhere else if you are experiencing unusual behavior with the program.

(1) If you happen to have the working spreadsheet open in Excel or some other program while you are using the data entry tool, and you click “Submit”, nothing will happen. The program cannot write data to the spreadsheet while it is open, so please make sure you close the spreadsheet BEFORE using this program.

(2) For this reason and others, it is strongly, STRONGLY recommended that you DO NOT touch the databases in Excel, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, etc. Although any AMV Tracker database can be opened, viewed, and edited in Excel, doing so may very well break its functionality with AMV Tracker. Because of certain limitations I had at the time I started writing this program, I ended up using a specific Python library that makes use of older versions of Excel documents. You may end up unknowingly converting a database to an incompatible filetype (i.e. *.xlsx), or if you edit any of the information directly in Excel, you could very easily screw up the way AMV Tracker displays video information on searches. This program was designed specifically so that you don’t ever have to interact with the spreadsheet directly, so you should never need to, however if you find yourself in a position where you want to for whatever reason, please manually make a backup and move it to a different directory before using AMV Tracker to interact with it, just to be safe.

(3) There is currently no ability to search with Unicode/non-ASCII characters. This is not planned to be fixed for future releases. This is because of the way Unicode works and the fact that it would be a major pain to implement, much more trouble than it’s worth. If you find that a video title or some other piece of information is all Unicode/non-ASCII/non-English characters, it’s recommended that you transliterate it on data entry if you want to make it searchable.

Just to be clear, Unicode/non-ASCII characters can be input on data entry, and will be displayed when the video is searched for, but the search function will not recognize any Unicode characters put into a search field (and in fact the program won’t do anything if you try to search using Unicode characters).

(4) On Genome Project data entry (not Free Entry), the duration fields have a built-in check to make sure that the you are entering a video duration greater than 0 seconds. Upon selecting either the minutes or seconds field, if you do not enter anything in that box, when you change the focus to anything else (either another field in the data entry window, or if you click outside of AMV Tracker), the box will autofill with 0. You will not be able to select anything else if both fields are 0, so if you find yourself stuck between those two boxes, just enter a numerical value to get out of it.

(5) There is a minor bug that affects sort order on search results; by default the results will be displayed in ascending alphabetical order by editor name, which works correctly, however for a single editor the videos may not be in any logical order (i.e. also in alphabetical order, which would make the most sense). There is an easy workaround for this — go to the Database Management functions, choose “Merge databases”, and select “blank_template.xls”. This will merge your working database with a blank one, so no videos will be added or modified, but in that process there is some code which sorts the entries first by editor name, and then alphabetically by video title. Upon searching again, all videos should be sorted alphabetically, grouped by editor.

(6) If you delete one or more videos from the database from the video edit window, weird things can happen if you try to search again right away, or try to click on things in the search results window. Simply go back to the home window and search again (or simply click the blue “Refresh” text at the top of the search options window) if you find that the program isn’t responding when it should be in these cases.

(7) On some of the older videos in the Genome Project database (release dates in 1990 or earlier), the search results show the correct release dates, but when you click the video title to edit them, the dates are off. Not entirely sure why this is, but it doesn’t appear to affect any other videos in the database.

(8) Program will occasionally close without warning, typically when editing existing entries, but sometimes at other random times as well. This is annoying but does not result in data loss; changes are always saved to the database before the program closes. I’m looking for reasons this bug exists but have had trouble consistently replicating the conditions under which it occurs, so I’m not sure when/if this will be fixed.